April 20, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to spend $75-million over five years to develop a vaccine to prevent the spread of pneumonia.
The money will support efforts by Path, a nonprofit group in Seattle, to work with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to develop a vaccine that targets several strains of pneumococcus, the bacterium that triggers pneumonia.
The disease kills up to one million children a year, 90 percent of whom live in poor countries.
The United States, Europe, and other wealthy parts of the world have had access to a pneumonia vaccine for about five years. But poor nations face several obstacles to benefiting from the drug, said Regina Rabinovich, director of the infectious-diseases program at the Seattle-based Gates Foundation.
The current vaccine is considered too expensive for global distribution and does not prevent the type of pneumococcus prevalent in Africa, India, and other poor regions.
Ms. Rabinovich estimates that about 40 percent of people in those areas would benefit from the drug used in America.
Path, which is also known as the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, will test a relatively new approach to preventing pneumococcus by identifying proteins that are prevalent in most strains of the virus. That way, a potential drug could stop several different strains of the killer disease.
While Path is hopeful about the project, it says that creating a viable drug to prevent pneumonia will take time. “We don’t expect to end the grant period with a vaccine,” said John W. Boslego, a former researcher with Merck & Company who now heads Path’s pneumococcus efforts.
